Where I blather on about being a mom and try to break through my writer's block.
My writer's block is so bad, it took me twenty minutes to write this description.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

VAX: Part I

Wow guys. Trying to find clear cut, black and white answers to these questions is probably going to be impossible. There is so much information out there, but much is opinion, inference, and guess. I'm still in the process of going through it all, and this is definitely going to be a multi-part posting.

I waded through a little bit of information from both camps, the yes-vax and the no-vax camps to be exact, and then decided I'd take one side at a time and investigate it. So here's the no-vax camp information, culled and paraphrased by yours truly. Of course, there is so very much more information out there than this, but this is the stuff that struck me, the stuff that worries me about vaccinating my 5 month old boy.

The no-vax camps can be very convincing. The National Vaccine Information Center, which is a non-profit organization started by a mother whose child had an adverse vaccine reaction and not an official government agency as the name might suggest, will suck you in after about 5 minutes of browsing. The website, www.909shot.com, is chock full of stories about bright beautiful babies who, after receiving vaccinations, became stunted emotionally, intelligently, and physically, and many who died. It’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible. This was the first site I came across in my investigation. I practically knocked my computer over in rage, and ran home from work to sweep my beautiful baby off someplace he couldn’t be harmed by evil immunizations. When you’re reading the stories, you can’t help but feel sorrow and rage. Imagine, your sweet little angel baby, who laughs at his grandma and squeals when the puppies lick his face, who grabs eagerly at toys and bottles, who looks at you and the world with the kind of wide eyed love and wonderment only a pure soul can muster. Then. Imagine all of that deteriorating, and a sickly, developmentally stunted child appearing in his place. Fucking heartbreaking. I can’t imagine going through something so horrible. BUT. As horrible as this would be, it could be caused by something other than vaccines. Right?

THE EVIL PRESERVATIVE THIMEROSAL

The amount of mercury that was in vaccines at one time (I believe until 1999) was hundreds of times the amount of mercury deemed safe for a child to be exposed to. I avoided fish during my pregnancy and eat it sparingly now during breastfeeding because of the risk of too much mercury. If it’s so dangerous that we need to limit our fish intake, injecting it into newborns is probably a fucking horrible idea. But they still used it in vaccines until staggering evidence that the mercury was causing horrible problems such as autism was finally brought to light.

Why mercury? One word: thimerosal. Thimserosal was a preservative used in all vaccines since the ‘30s. Vaccines needed preservatives because often a vaccine wasn’t produced in individual doses, but in a big jar that was used many times to treat many people, therefore needles were put into it over and over, and some were live viruses, not dead ones, and…at this point I stop understanding the science and just nod my head. But they needed preservatives, and thimerosal it was, until people realized they were giving children deadly amounts of mercury.

So they stopped using thimerosal, and made individual doses instead of one big jar, and the live viruses got preservatives made with things other than mercury. Problem solved…right?

Maybe not…

VACCINES THEMSELVES ARE THE DANGER NOT FOR WHAT THEY CONTAIN BUT FOR WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW THEY WORK

This article on the NVIC website is very interesting. The gist of it is, vaccines are dangerous to those genetically predisposed to diseases like autism and autoimmune disorders. The vaccine, combined with the genetic predisposition, combined with the fact that the kid was on antibiotics when he got his shot, could bring those diseases into being.So…how do I know if my kid is genetically predisposed? My husband has fibromyalgia and I have asthma. Does that do it? Even if I don’t get the baby any vaccines while he’s sick or on antibiotics, will the vaccines still trigger it? And a lot of the stories I read weren’t just, bam, one day my kid has autism, they were, bam, one day my normal kid who didn’t get sick a lot is suddenly getting ear infections and diarrhea out the wazoo, and after this went on for awhile, the autism showed up.

The article offers some explanation for why vaccinations could cause a myriad of problems, from diarrhea to autism. It says that the entire concept of vaccines is harmful, in the way they affect the immune system and developing child brain. The article explains in some complex terms how our immune system works naturally, and how it’s different when we get vaccines instead of getting sick the normal way. It says that the fundamental way vaccines work could be causing the chronic illnesses so many people face today that seem to come from nothing. So maybe it’s the vaccine itself that causes autism/other developmental disorders/autoimmune disorders.

Now this argument is harder to prove. Go ahead and read the article to get a better idea, but it's not something that's black and white. If you believe this, then taking the thimerosal out is still ignoring part of the problem, that the fundamental vaccine-ness of vacciness is the bad thing. It's easy to blame things that have no apparant cause on vaccines (all the autoimmunes, m.s., fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.), but what if it IS vaccines' fault? WHAT IF?

Next time: I try to debunk the above argument by visiting the yes-vax camp.